Hildegard ate most of the tacos!

Levi Bryant has written a drove of meaty new posts in the past couple days. There’s one about his blue mug, one about entanglement, one that asks if eclipses are objects, and one about ideology.

But it’s his post about strange mereologies that I want to point you to today. As Bryant explains, the strangeness in object-oriented mereology is this: both the components of an object and that object itself are equally objects. Levi’s example is the couple, which is not two objects but three (the two individuals and the couple).

Given our commitment to realism in a time when the linguistic turn still gyrates, it’s always risky to start invoking language as a mediator of philosophical concerns. But in this case Levi’s post brought to my mind a linguistic concept that may actually be helpful in clarifying the object-oriented ontologist’s mereological position: grammatical number.

English spoils us when it comes to number; we can have one thing or many things. But in Greek and Sanskrit and Gothic and Arabic and many other languages, speakers are afforded a way to refer to two of something in one fell swoop. There are a few moments in English when we come close (“a pair of pants” or “a scissors”), but mostly we don’t have this additional distinction between parts and wholes, a distinction that amounts to acknowledging the wholeness of something at the same time as we acknowledge that it is made of the parts that make it thus.

There aren’t many other grammatical numbers beyond singular, plural, and dual. Many languages (including Chinese and Japanese) make no distinction of number whatsoever. But there’s one further grammatical number that might drive the point home further: partitive plural.

The partitive plural is used to refer to some part of a larger group (whereas the ordinary plural always refers to a group comprehensively). It’s used in Finnish, but I don’t know any Finnish. I do know that J.R.R. Tolkien adapted the partitive plural from Finnish, making it one of the four grammatical numbers of Quenya, or “High Elven.” Which is, you know, an endorsement if I’ve ever seen one.

The partitive plural acknowledges weird mereology differently than does the dual. A thing in the partitive plural acknowledges a larger whole, a smaller part of that whole, and a great variety of possible wholes simultaneously. This is a hard concept to translate into a language that doesn’t support it, but try the following example on for size:

Hildegard ate five of the eight tacos!

I’ve had to force this example into the partitive plural, of course. If we had a true version of it in English, the specification “five of the eight” wouldn’t be needed (we’d probably say something like “Hildegard ate some of the tacos!” or even “Hildegard ate most of the tacos!” If you’ll allow me to cognatize “taco” into Quenya, we end up with something like this:

Hildegard máta i tacoli

In case your Quenya is rusty, the comprehensive plural of “taco” would be “tacor” instead of “tacoli.” Dorkship aside, you can see here how the use of the partitive plural is suggestive of a myriad of other memberships besides the purported basket of tacos Hildegard raided before her poor friends arrived. The larger group might include the set of tacos prepared by the taqueria that night, or the varieties of tacos available on its menu, to name but two.

Sure, you could argue that the English phrase “most of the tacos” offers similar connotations, but it does not come vacuum-packed into a single signifier in the way that it does in Quenya (even in Finnish, as I understand it, the use of the partitive plural is not so clean as it is in High Elven). In this respect, the partitive plural offers one example of a whole that is made of parts, but still distinct as a whole, and yet also itself a part of many other wholes, wholes which are themselves are also still partial.